Where or When

by Anita Shreve

  A chill shakes him. He stands up to leave, glances again at the flickering votive candles, remembers now what it was he was supposed to get for Harriet: light bulbs. He hurries to the car. He has been gone too long. He needs to get home, be with his children. And Christ, he forgot: the ducks—he has to marinate the ducks.

  Pulling into his driveway, he sees the twinkling Christmas tree behind the window of the family room. At least Harriet has finished the lights, he thinks, emerging guiltily from the car. When he enters the kitchen, his children and his dog run in to greet him. His children’s love is physical; they climb up his legs, tug on his arms—even Hadley, who snuggles into his shoulder. They squeal at him that he is wet and that his coat smells from the damp. As he removes his coat and jacket, he gently shakes off his children, one by one. He slips his tie through his collar, rolls his sleeves, and squats to nuzzle Winston’s head in affection.

  The children lead him into the family room to admire the tree. Harriet is perched on a stool, trying to repair the star atop the tree; it lists to port. She has on jeans, a hunter-green sweater. He studies her broad shoulders, the swell of her hips below her sweater, the way the jeans pinch in at the crotch. But when he looks at her, he feels nothing, not even a certainty of what her body looks like beneath her clothes. Sometimes he cannot even remember what it was like to make love to Harriet, what it was they did together, as if his time with Siân had somehow erased that particular loop. He watches his wife’s sweater ride up in back as she reaches again for the top of the tree. He studies the sliver of pink skin above her waistband. The skin seems foreign to him, skin he has never touched.

  “Let me get that,” he says behind her.

  “Oh,” she says, turning to him, flushed with her effort. “Thanks.”

  “I got the light bulbs,” he says.

  She steps off the stool. They exchange places.

  “How did your appointment go?” she asks.

  “Fine,” he says. “It went fine.”

  He hasn’t told her yet about the bank. At breakfast he announced only that he had an appointment. The ubiquitous and generic “appointment.”

  “You’ve been gone awhile,” she says, looking at her watch. “I was worried you wouldn’t get home in time to do the ducks.”

  “Had to buy a couple of rounds. You know how it is at Christmas.”

  Charles secures the star with picture wire. It’s still off five degrees, but it will do.

  “How have the kids been?” he asks, stepping off the stool, facing her.

  She stares at him a moment, puts a finger to his chest, strokes the cloth of his shirt in the vicinity of his left nipple. Idly, as though lost in a memory. Her eyes are uncharacteristically vacant, staring at the skin above the top button of his shirt.

  “Harriet.”

  She looks up at him, dragged reluctantly from her reverie. Her eyes are a vivid blue-violet and large—her best feature. He has sometimes thought her pretty; she is pretty. But not beautiful. He tries to remember if he ever told her she was beautiful. Perhaps at the beginning. He must have then. He hopes he did.

  “Jack is in orbit,” she says slowly, removing her finger from his chest. “Hadley has been helping me with the tree. She wants to make cookies when you’ve finished with the ducks and the pâté.”

  She opens her mouth again, then closes it. She seems to want to say something more, something that is hard for her to say, and he knows that if she does, he will have to tell her. He wants to tell her that he is sorry, that whatever has happened or not happened between them, it was not her fault. That it wasn’t because she wasn’t beautiful or that he didn’t want to love her. Or that he has been recognized, at last, in a way his wife has never known him. He puts his hand on the sleeve of her sweater, rubs her arm between her elbow and her shoulder.

  She moves away from him, turns her face to the side. “Keep your eye on Anna,” she says. “I have one or two more presents to wrap.”

  “Harriet?”

  “Yes?”

  She looks at him, wary now, the vacant look gone entirely. She narrows her eyes, seems almost irritated, impatient to leave the room.

  “My parents will be here at four,” she says.

  Handel’s Messiah blasts from the kitchen speakers. He has played it so often through the years that he knows almost all the words by heart. He likes particularly to belt out the “Hallelujah” chorus and does so as he puts the ingredients for the marinade—teriyaki sauce, fresh ginger, soy sauce, garlic, shallots, sherry, and a splash of red wine—into the several roasting bags. He has cut the breasts and legs and thighs off six ducks; purple carcasses line the yellow Formica kitchen counter. Winston stands by his feet, his nose pointed upward, alert for a tidbit that might deliberately fall his way. Somewhere between the second and third ducks, Charles sliced the tip of a finger; he has stanched the bleeding with a kitchen towel, which is now wrapped untidily around his hand. Hadley, leaning against the counter, studies her father thoughtfully. He glances down at her face, at the steady gaze of her large brown eyes. She looks concerned.

  “Dad,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  He slides duck pieces into a roasting bag with a flourish, sets it along with the other bags in a large pan on the counter. He is on a roll now, four cookbooks open on the island. His menu did not really come together until somewhere between “O thou that tellest . . .” and “All we like sheep . . .,” and he has been into town twice for extra ingredients for his meal—once to the fish market, once to the Italian deli—emptying his checking account in the process. He is aware that his menu is somewhat eclectic and that possibly all of the proper components are not quite there, but he has always preferred to cook because he felt like making the separate dishes, not necessarily because they formed a perfect whole—and he thinks that somehow this spontaneous and haphazard desire might be applicable to his life and his financial ruin as well. In addition to the duck carcasses on the counter, he has now two fillets of salt cod for the baccalá; five pounds of mussels (he hadn’t planned on the mussels, but he couldn’t pass them up at the fish store—he will serve them in a brine of tomato, basil, capers, and white wine); one fillet of salmon, which he will coat with salt and sugar and dill, and marinate in plastic wrap so that it will cook itself (they’ll have the resultant gravlox for an appetizer); and a medley of scallops, shrimp, and smoked salmon, which he will do up in squid ink pasta, along with red pepper slices, as an accompaniment to the duck. Into a massive teak salad bowl he presses out several garlic cloves, then mixes the paste with the anchovies, along with Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, mustard, capers and hot sauce He tastes his efforts with a spoon and makes an extravagant gesture of approval for Hadley, kissing his fingers with a moue of his lips. The Caesar will have a good scald on it, he tells his daughter. The counter is awash in body parts, spilled sugar, chopped dill, empty sauce bottles, bottle caps, wet spoons, and flour from the sourdough bread. He kneads the bread in a baking bowl, trying to camouflage into the dough the inadvertent smears of blood leaking from the wet kitchen towel around his hand. Jack comes into the kitchen, looks at the carnage on the counter.

  “Ew, yuck, Dad. What are you making?” he asks.

  “Don’t ask,” says Hadley.

  Charles feels almost happy now—or a state as close to happy as he has been able to achieve in this house, in this town. If he keeps moving, he is certain, his dinner will be a success. He has to choreograph his pots, conduct the play between the stovetop and the oven so that the ducks won’t conflict with the sourdough bread, so that his largest pot will be free for the mussels after he has made the pasta. He doesn’t worry much about timing, however: Though his timing in love and finance have been appalling, he has been blessed with an uncanny sixth sense when it comes to cooking. Cooking is orchestral, he decides, resembling something of a symphony or at least a concerto, the movements allegro or largo, depending on the tempo of his swoops and turns a
s he reaches between the island and the fridge, between the stove and the counter, as he plays the butter of a roux, the garlic of a sauce. He has Bing on now. Can’t make Christmas dinner without Bing, he says to his younger daughter, Anna, who has come into the kitchen to observe the performance. He reaches up to pour himself another tumbler of the Kendall-Jackson, a nice dry red, which he opened because he needed it as the finishing touch to the marinade, and as he does so he notices that the bottle is nearly empty. His dress shirt and the pants to his suit are spotted with olive oil and flour and bits of something brown that might be blood. He has an apron somewhere in the kitchen, but he has been unable to find it.

  Outside the warm kitchen, a gust of rain sweeps against the windows, rattling the windowpanes. He takes a sip of the dregs of the red, looks through the panes to the sheets of water beyond. He wonders where she is, what she is doing at this precise moment. He glances at the phone, thinks fleetingly of calling her, then shakes off the desire: He cannot risk hearing the resonant voice of her husband, having to hang up on the man once again. He tries to imagine what her husband looks like, tries to envision the body that might go with the voice; Charles has never asked Siân, and she has not volunteered any details, about her husband’s appearance. With the heel of his hand, he punches down the rising dough in the bread bowl, pummels it roughly. He wants her now, with an ache that is not physical, or not entirely physical. His body feels taut, stretched with wanting her, wanting simply to be in her presence. He bends suddenly at the waist, touching his forehead to the surface of the island. He wants to lower himself to the floor. His insides feel hollow, empty without her.

  “Daddy?”

  Charles glances up quickly, remembers his children. Hadley looks quizzical.

  He forces himself upright, smiles.

  “Dessert,” he says.

  “Dessert?”

  “I have to think about dessert.”

  “I want Christmas cookies,” says Anna.

  He opens a cookbook on the island. He contemplates the ceiling. Winston, who has come to him, nuzzles his knees. He has an image of a French tart; no, of a flan. He thinks about custard; does he have the ingredients? He could do a crème brûlée possibly. Yes, that’s it, he decides, cracking open another bottle of the Kendall-Jackson. A ginger crème brûlée—the ginger will be a perfect holiday nuance for the end of the meal. What will he need? he wonders. Eggs? Cream? He has fresh ginger from the marinade. Sugar, of course. And a blowtorch. Can’t caramelize the top without a blowtorch. He tries to think where it was he learned this: in the kitchen of a restaurant just outside Providence. He’d inquired of the waiter, as he sometimes did in restaurants, how a dish was prepared (in this case, a particularly fragile peach crème brûlée) and had been summoned into the kitchen by the chef himself, who’d demonstrated the blowtorch technique: Sprinkle a thin layer of granulated sugar along the top of the custard; blast it with the torch. The process—definitely overkill and probably not ecologically sound—was repeated until the top of the crème was a paper-thin disk of caramelized sugar, like a perfect circle of delicate brown ice.

  He gathers on the island the eggs and cream and sugar and ginger, finds a clean bowl and the eggbeater. He stands on a stool, investigates the top shelf of the cabinet over the fridge. He has an idea that there is behind the champagne glasses a set of custard dishes, ramekins, perfect for the crème brûlée. He sees them, snakes his hand through the champagne glasses, then hears his name spoken by his wife in a tone that reminds him of a teacher he had in seventh grade.

  “Charles.”

  He teeters for a moment on the stool, turns around to face his family. They are standing there beneath him, aligned at the end of the counter—Harriet, Hadley, Jack, and Anna. The tableau they make is characterized by composite alarm. He knows how he must look to them—the singular embodiment of the chaos he has created, both within the kitchen and without. He holds a champagne glass in one hand, a ramekin in the other. His shirt is soaked under the armpits, smeared with duck entrails and flour; the kitchen towel is still ineffectually wrapped around a hand. They stare at him as if at any moment he might be able to explain himself. From his considerable height, he surveys the kitchen—a bloody and ungentle mess, a manic attempt to stave off the unbearable sadness of Christmas.

  He looks at his children and his wife, at the walls of a house he no longer owns.

  “No one is saved, and no one is totally lost,” he tells his assembled family.

  The sun had set not a half hour before, and in the west there was still an orange dust at the horizon. The air was dry, the evening lit up already with the summer constellations. He walked her down with the others to the water’s edge, where tonight there would be a bonfire, a small celebration for the Fourth. In his hand he carried sparklers. He gave one to her, lit it for her with the matches he had in his shirt pocket. The golden sprinkles from the sparklers illuminated their faces. In front of them, and behind them, there was laughter and chatter, as the others walked singly or in pairs, some with sparklers of their own. It was exciting, this walk in the darkness down to the lake, the path known but not certain, the event producing in the air a sense of freedom, an element of risk.

  The counselors had made the pyre already, were hovering importantly nearby. The children took their places in a semicircle around the wood and the straw, facing the lake. It was the last night of camp and friendships had formed, delineated in the shapes that drew closer to each other. She sat beside him on the ground, their knees raised, their arms touching from the shoulder to the elbow, and for a time it was all that she could absorb—the length and dizziness of that touch, a thin delicate line along her skin. Until he moved his arm and put it around her, finding with his fingers first the capped sleeve of her blouse, then the skin beneath it. Neither spoke or dared to look at the other.

  The straw was lit, bursting noisily into flames, crackling toward the sky, letting loose a shower of sparks that arced upward and died before they could fall on hair and bare skin. Someone, a figure lit by the fire, led the group in songs, summer camp songs and songs for the Fourth. The boy sang beside her, his voice nearly a man’s, but she could not sing. She felt the pressure of his arm along her back, the imprint of his fingers on her skin. The fire obscured the cross, obliterated the lake.

  When the singing was over, the counselors produced long sticks and marshmallows. The boy hesitated, moved his arm away from her, stood up. She watched him walk toward the counselors, take a stick and a marshmallow, poke it toward the fire, which had settled some. She watched his back, his body just a silhouette. He spoke to another boy.

  He returned, sat facing her. He removed the gooey marshmallow, charred on the outside, and held it out to her. She exclaimed, started to speak, so that when he thrust it toward her, it caught on her lips and teeth, smearing her mouth. In the confusion, laughing at the mess, she licked the marshmallow from his fingers as he tried to push it in. She caught one finger between her teeth, released it. Embarrassed, she laughed again and said that he was mean.

  He licked the stickiness from his own fingers. When they were clean, he put his hand into his pocket and withdrew an object. She couldn’t see in the darkness what the object was. He held it for a moment, then seized her arm at the wrist. He put the object into her palm, closing his hand for a moment over hers. She fingered the object, rolled it in her palm. She felt the links of a chain, the sharp edges of metal charms.

  “It’s a bracelet,” she said, holding it in a fist. Her breath was tight and shallow.

  “I wanted something to give you,” he said beside her.

  When she looked at him, she could see only that half of his face that was lit by the orange of the fire, a light that made shadows in his eyes and with his cheekbones.

  He took her hand, and she thought that he might remove the bracelet from her fist and put it on her, but instead he made her stand up. He led her up the path, away from the others; the chatter and the laughter around the bonfire faded
as they walked. Above them, trees rustled in the night breeze. In the distance, up the hill, she could see the glow of the lights in the main house, the lights from the dining room, some individual lights in bedrooms where they had been left on.

  When they were halfway up the path, the boy stepped off the worn track and into the woods. She was not sure exactly what he meant to do, but strangely, she was not afraid. She followed closely behind him, sometimes touching his shirt, as he led the way, held branches for her, pointed out to her where there was a rock or a log. She wondered briefly how they would find the path again, then dismissed her worry. All she could think was that within hours her parents would come to the camp to fetch her and drive her north to Springfield, and that she might never see this boy again.

  An owl hooted, startling them both. She laughed nervously, reached out for him. He stopped, turned to face her. She could barely see his eyes in the moonlight, the strong moonlight that had been on the path obscured now by the overhead trees. She sensed rather than saw him, felt his presence near, his own shallow breathing, the heat from his chest and arms. “The stars are amazing tonight,” he said, looking up at the sky. “Can you read the constellations?”

  “The Big Dipper,” she said. “And sometimes the Little Dipper. But that’s all.”

  “Mmmm. Me too.” He took a step closer, so that his face was just over hers.

  He tilted his head slightly, bent to kiss her. Instinctively she raised her chin. He caught her at the side of the mouth, held his lips there. The kiss was dry and feathery, so tentative she was not certain they were actually touching, though she could feel his breath on her cheek. He put his hands on her arms; she lifted her hands so they touched his back. She had never kissed a boy before, had never even held hands with a boy until she met him. Each touch was new and exhilarating, but she knew that he would not hurt her.